Repairing Relationships Advice: Be Open Minded

Video Transcript

"All right. Now we are going to share these perspectives with the other person. And this is where it can get a little tricky. The first thing you have to do when you're going to start talking to this person about these problems that you're having, about what it is that you want, is you have to have an open mind. Be open to what can develop out of this. You also want to be very empathetic. And again, we talked about this in the last clip, but always be aware of how they're feeling. What you want to avoid, as you're sharing this information, is using terms like never. Well, you never do this. Now, in retrospect, do they never do it, or do they not do it as much as you want them to? And that's why it was really important that you establish these things in concrete terms, because blanket statements like always and never, that's very attacking. And we don't want to attack this person, because, remember, we're trying to repair this relationship. So as we're discussing these things, we want to be as descriptive and as specific as we can be."